Manufactured Nationalism
When revisiting Mount Rushmore, it becomes quickly apparent that there are conflicting and at times directly opposing viewpoints and interpretations of the monument itself, social philosophies, and varying individuals associated with the memorial site. Each subjective interpretation of the various facts, people, and historical events can be tied into how we answer the fundamental question, "What is the purpose of Mount Rushmore?"
From Gutzon Borglum himself we are given the purpose of "recording the significance of of [the Anglo-Saxon] civilization [in the Western Hemisphere] in reshaping the philosophy of politics and government throughout the world." (Borglum 1930, vii). He also makes the direct argument that Mount Rushmore serves as a vehicle for a kind of deification of the monument's subjects, when he says "We believe a nation's memorial should, like Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, have a serenity, a nobility, a power that reflects the gods who inspired them and the gods that they have become." (Borglum 1930). From the beginning, then, Mount Rushmore is intricately tied into the concept of manufacturing some sort of symbolic nationalism, aimed primarily at Anglo-Americans and their culture.
As Matthew Glass argues in his 1991 essay "Producing Patriotic Inspiration at Mount Rushmore", one of the main ways that the memorial serves to inspire patriotic American nationalism is because the memorial demonstrates the American need to give the landscape of the heartland a human visage. (Glass 1991, 277) When this has been done with the faces of four white presidents
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